In a study focusing on Freud's concept of das Unheimlich, Nicholas Royle writes of the spectral presences of often indeterminate intertextual influences within literary works. For Royle, such presences, far from recognisable and overt, are ‘textual phantoms which do not necessarily have the solidity or objectivity of a quotation, an intertext or explicit, acknowledged presence and which, in fact, do not come to rest anywhere’. In other words, intertextuality is more often manifested in terms of an absence, what Hélène Cixous has categorised as ‘what escapes in the unfolding of a text’ and that often emerges only fleetingly as a ‘hesitating shadow’. Rather than constituting a direct borrowing or an overt presence, then, intertextuality is often a fleeting vision of things half recognised, half known, a conversation not quite resonating but casting precursive shadows over productions within the here-and-now.

While Cixous and Royle are more concerned with the spectrality of intertextual influence within contemporary writing, their words bear some weight in fashioning our understanding (or highlighting our lack of it) of the often indeterminate intertextuality of the so-called ‘canonical’ works of any given culture. In English and wider European contexts, for example, in spite of a longstanding keenness to anatomise with some precision Chaucer's drawing on Boccaccio, or the Pearl-poet's reliance upon Dante, beyond the world of Margery Kempe studies and the context of devotional literature, the more widespread influence of continental holy women's writing within broader English literary contexts has not been a pressing enterprise for contemporary commentators. In turn, as already addressed by other contributors to this present volume, this posits pertinent questions regarding a wider, more global – and gendered – erasure of women's literary endeavours during the period referred to in the west loosely as ‘medieval’.

This chapter aims to approach this shortfall within English contexts specifi-cally by offering a snapshot of the sometimes ‘hesitating shadow’ that is the Middle English translation of Mechthild of Hackeborn's (d. 1298) Liber specialis gratiae, known as The Boke of Gostely Grace (texts discussed briefly by both Yoshikawa and Loveridge in their own contributions to this volume). The Latin text was attributed to the German nun Mechthild of Hackeborn and, in both its Latin and Middle English manifestations, haunts an array of late-medieval English works as a shadowy and spectral intertext. Versions of this text were circulated widely throughout Europe soon after its inception in the closing years of the thirteenth century.